The Best Review Citation Sources in Canada and the UK

You may remember, in January I caught the data bug, and put together a list of review sources based on these buggers:

UPDATE: Sadly, the above no longer exists. Your best bet is to run your competitors citations, just as you would while doing competitive analysis, and checking out where they have reviews among those citations. Jotting it down, and returning to it later.

These are sources where one’s business data has appeared, and Goog has matched the data up to this Google My Business listing. Note: while I will call them review sources, in many cases, there were NO reviews to be found. So, we know, when it comes to local data Google finds valuable, the don’t discriminate at the review level, NOR at the type of site level. In fact, some sites they scraped were just plain shady. You’d almost think Google likes spam… ;)

A quick review of how we arrived at this data/list, we, in this order, AND NOT MANUALLY (thank god!):

Pushed a button, did a jig (possibly several), and watched our scraper do…

Okay, so let me elaborate on the last item (Ranked ‘em like a boss), as it brings everything together. We ranked our UK and Canadian data by assigning 1 point to a property every time it showed up in the first 3 pages of places results. We did this to get a baseline for how popular each property is with the search engines. This is how we did it in our previous research.

Okay, you’re bored stiff. Without further ado, after having analysed nearly 250,000 listings, I give you our lists:

Best Canadian Review Citation Sources

directory

points

urbanspoon.com

2413

tripadvisor.com

2379

tripadvisor.ca

1811

canpages.ca

1226

monavis.ca

1121

booking.com

908

yellowpages.ca

804

yahoo.com

760

foursquare.com

671

n49.ca

594

homestars.com

557

hotels.com

458

tripadvisor.co.uk

448

hotelscombined.com

446

superpages.com

446

weblocal.ca

439

giftly.com

386

pageinsider.com

383

theblurb.ca

350

insiderpages.com

344

merchantcircle.com

320

411.ca

282

destinia.com

265

restaurantica.com

259

dealerrater.ca

240

pagespan.com

233

goldbook.ca

222

pageglimpse.com

213

ourfaves.com

209

venere.com

183

demandforce.com

183

vetratingz.com

176

tripadvisor.in

162

citysearch.com

151

foodpages.ca

143

restaurant.ca

142

opentable.com

126

virtualtourist.com

117

expedia.com

116

dexknows.com

106

tastegenius.com

102

priceline.com

102

dine.com

101

aol.com

97

greatschools.org

97

dealerrater.com

97

yellowpages.com

97

giftrocket.com

93

canadianhotelguide.com

91

tripadvisor.com.au

90

This list didn’t surprise me much at all, and overall, I think it is a pretty well balanced list. Tripadvisor is always a big one. Qype too, but it didn’t make the top 50 in this case. Things get a bit more interesting in the top 100, and even beyond. Like my US research, there are tons of outliers you’d NEVER think to submit to – nor would your competitors ;)

Looking back on this, I think I would try and categorize the types of properties. For example, break up all the hotel related ones, all the restaurant related ones. I think in my next iteration I will. For the time being, you are going to have to do a bit of digging yourself. Fortunately, I have laid it out fairly simply for you, so it shouldn’t be too hard to identify which are specific to you. Finally, it’s worth mentioning, that even if you don’t quite “fit in” on a property, that doesn’t mean you won’t get reviews there, and it certainly doesn’t mean it isn’t a valuable citation source.

Want 500+ more killer, UK review citation sources?

What the heck would I want UK or CAN data for? Give me US data! Get, get, GET IT!

Updated June 8, 2015 by Adam Steele

About Adam Steele

A SEO & Local SEO by trade, Adam spends the majority of his time creating new efficiencies through smart processes and the leveraging of technology. He is ruthlessly passionate about building smart, lean businesses, and exploring new, lean, internet marketing techniques. Find him on Twitter @AdamGSteele.

http://www.leanmarketing.ca Adam Steele

Hey ya’ll, getting reports of lists being caught in the Spam folder. Please take a look if you can’t find yours. Working to fix now : ) Thx!

http://www.whitespark.ca Darren Shaw

Adam, this is pure awesome. I love using your US data to identify the best places to get reviews in any particular industry. Now we have Canadian and UK data as well. If you could categorize these by industry, it would be even awesomer. This is a great contribution to the the local search community. Thanks for putting it together.